


A man doesn't choose his mother or father

by queen_ypolita



Category: Alexander Trilogy - Mary Renault
Genre: Community: trope_bingo, Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-11
Updated: 2014-01-11
Packaged: 2018-01-08 08:56:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1130678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queen_ypolita/pseuds/queen_ypolita
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A scribe muses on Alexander's chosen family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A man doesn't choose his mother or father

**Author's Note:**

> Written to fill the "chosen family" square on my trope_bingo card as well as my Day 7 entry for the Fandom Snowflake challenge.

The voice droned on. The scribe yawned, stood up straighter and pushed himself back into focus. " _At this time, Alexander was said to have adopted Zeus Ammon as his father, disowning Philip his natural father..._ ", he wrote neatly, following the slow, steady dictation as easily as he breathed air. 

There was a short break from the dictation soon after, and he stretched and let his thoughts drift. He kept going back to the sentence about Alexander adopting the god as his father. These heroes, how different their ways were from the lives of ordinary mortals. A man didn't choose his father or his mother who had been chosen by the gods before he came into being. In the best scenario, the scribe mused, he had a mother who survived the labour and a father who was the mother's husband, but deficiencies on one or the other score didn't make a man's life worthless. Perhaps a man who had lost his mother or father early on and raised by other relatives or friends of the family might choose to look to these people as his parents, but that was the exception, not the rule, not a proper outlook for a man whose mother and father lived to see him into adulthood. But these heroes weren't like ordinary men. Hadn't Alexander found another mother too? The scribe chased the memory of another text he had copied once. Oh yes, Alexander had thought highly of Darius's mother, and called her Mother and treated her with more respect than his own mother. 

The scribe shook his head at the thought. The text had described Olympias as wily and single-minded, but there were worse things you could say about a man's mother. She had done her job of bringing Alexander into the world and by many accounts, had fought his corner after her son skipped out for his adventures far away in Asia. And Philip, he had been a good king and a good soldier, someone a son could look up to and honour. The scribe would have understood if a son with a good-for-nothing father had decided to find a better one, even one who was a god, but a son of Philip didn't have that problem. 

The dictation started again and the scribe pulled his thoughts together. He wrote mechanically, producing one neat line after another until the next break for midday meal. The text had moved on to an analysis of Alexander's achievements, but his thoughts still lingered on Alexander's chosen family. Perhaps, the scribe thought, once he had conquered the Egyptian lands, fought and defeated Darius and made himself the overlord of Persia, Alexander could no longer see himself as the son of the King of Macedon and his Molossian wife, heir to a small and insignificant corner of the Greek lands, and adopted ones that made him feel true to his achievements. 

The scribe put his writing tools away for the break and stretched. He didn't know where these philosophical thoughts had come. He was just a scribe, he was asked to copy texts down, not to understand what they meant.


End file.
